The Things that Bind Us
by GreyMajesty
Summary: And through it all, they still had the sweater. And a promise.


Disclaimer: I do not own any of the characters in the MCU. This fic takes place through multiple places in the timeline, starting before the first Avengers and continuing into the first movie. Fairly canon compliant.

The heavy hooded sweater was a soft weight in the cold air of the quinjet as Clint dropped it on the shoulders of the red-haired woman across from him as he headed into the cockpit. Her head snapped up, green eyes wild as they were wary.

"What are you doing?" Her English was flawless, Clint noticed, but there was a hint of her Russian heritage on the syllables every once in a while.

"It's a long flight. You've been out in the snow." He leaned back into the pilot's chair, flicking switches as the engines hummed to life. He heard a rustle behind him and his hand involuntarily strayed for his gun even as she crept up to join him, sitting stiffly in the copilot's seat. The dark grey sweater was bundled loosely in her fists.

"Going to put me down, agent Barton?" Her voice was steady, but her tightly clenched fingers betrayed her. He could try, but the tentative pact they'd made out in that shell of a building stretched between them like an invisible string. He was her way out. Would he have offered to take her with him if he hadn't wanted to help her?

"Old habits die hard, but I think the people I work for will see why I'm not inclined to do so." She let out a scoff, but at his pointed glare, pulled the sweater over her snow-dampened hair and let it fall in loose folds about her shoulders. It was large, but not ridiculously so. She picked absently at the knotted end of the drawstring and watched Clint intently from her peripheral vision while he guided the jet up into the snowy Russian sky. The trees dropped away from under them, and the flickering white flecks outside the windshield quickly turned into a dizzying display that made her eyes heavy.

Did she dare sleep while a stranger held her life in their hands? She snuck a quick glance at the man in the pilot's seat. Broad shouldered and silent, but his fingers tapped a nearly silent beat on the controls while his head bobbed along to the rhythm. Natasha smoothed her choppy red curls away from her eyes and pulled the sleeves down into her hands as she curled them into fists. Her scraped knuckles tingled from where the fabric drug over them, but she ignored it.

Five minutes. She could let her eyes close for five minutes. He was the only one on this plane besides her, and she'd already proven she was his equal or even better in hand to hand combat. If he tried anything at all, she could drop him and take control of the jet, promises be damned. And she was tired.

Natasha Romanoff closed her eyes on her past and let the swirling white snow outside lull her into the soundest sleep she'd had in weeks.

Clint Barton's grey hoodie stayed tucked over her shoulders all through her debriefing in SHIELD headquarters, and the night in the holding cell, it warded off the chill of the cinderblock walls. The smell of men's deodorant and handgun grease lingered in the fabric as she drifted off to sleep. The day Natasha Romanoff was taken out of the holding cell and moved into her own quarters, she pulled the sweater off her shoulders and left it folded neatly in a bag on the handle of Phil Coulson's office door. He'd get it back to Barton, she knew, and it was time to move on without an emotional crutch.

It was time to let go, to slip her new team and move on. Drop her new home and find her way back to her comfort zone. Like an addict chasing a high, she found herself roaming the halls like a shadow the moment she found her clearance past level one, stalking through maintenance hallways, looking for something to poke her nose into.

The day she managed to make a copy of the flight plans for the following week, she knew it was time to go. She stood on the bridge to the flight deck, her unassuming black bag filled with the few items she'd need to get back into her web. A thick roll of bills from multiple countries, and their corresponding passports, her old tactical gear, and her personal weapons lay under a few case files she'd been gifted. She could go, and by the time they knew she was missing she'd be far from their radar and out of their reach.

Except for Clint Barton. He was an anchor, a hook in her heart, a guilt complex keeping her grounded. He found her in the catwalks and dusty storage spaces and trailed after her, humming. He brought her coffee with cream on the mornings they woke up before dawn for training, and bantered with himself in the silences she left for him, talking for hours about everything and nothing. Clint Barton was an ignorant fool.

But she couldn't leave him. He'd tried to save her, after all. If she left, the axe came down on his shoulders. Clint Barton had gambled wildly with her, and she knew it. She hefted the bag back over her shoulder and made her way back through the halls of the Hellicarrier, unsurprised when she found a familiar plastic bag hanging on her own door.

Neither of them mentioned that Natasha showed up to her first meeting with their handler with the sweater over her new tactical gear.

By the time Natasha got down to medical, Clint was already in recovery. She'd been halfway through her flight on a commercial airline back to the states when her emergency line had chirped, bearing only a text from Coulson that Clint had been in an altercation and he'd been checked out by the medics, was fine, and awake and already complaining. Still, it took her the rest of the flight back to slow her heartbeat enough that she could think. Whatever he had done to himself, she was going to give him an earful- firstly for being an idiot, and secondly for worrying her.

She was the first one off the jet when it landed, and she stalked through the airport to the baggage carousel, impatiently snagging her duffel bag when it slid off the ramp. Her rental car was right where she'd left it, and she tossed the bag into the backseat before sliding in and jamming the key into the ignition. SHIELD headquarters was a half hour away, but with her driving, she'd be able to get there in less than twenty.

Clint Barton was not having a good day. He'd been out on a stakeout at a coffee shop across from a drug syndicate when one of the criminals decided he'd seen Clint looking his way a little too much. The street had turned into a shootout, a mess of an operation before it had even properly begun. Clint had abandoned his latte and made it halfway up the nearest fire escape, bow unfolded in his hand, before a bullet caught him high in the shoulder and he tumbled backward down the steps. SHIELD contained the scene and Coulson found him in a pile at the bottom of the steps, unconscious.

Clint was propped up on a mound of pillows and higher than a kite by the time Natasha opened the door. The shades were drawn and the lights were dim, but she could see that Clint was awake enough to be fiddling with an IV. Coulson sat on a chair in the corner with a newspaper open in his lap, and he glanced up in time to see her stalk into the room and sit on the bed beside Clint's blanketed thigh.

"Hi, Nat." Clint wiggled the fingers of his uninjured arm at her, and she pulled the tubing away from his explorative fingers. "How was Ukraine?"

"You are such an idiot." Natasha studied the monitors by Clint's headboard. "You got shot again, and all you can say is 'hi'?"

"I'm fiiiiiiine."

"You're concussed." Coulson closed his paper and moved to pick up the doctor's chart at the end of the bed. "Concussed and possessing a mildly severe puncture wound." He handed the chart to Natasha, who flipped through it, eyes narrowed. "So, fundamentally, you are not fine."

"Stop worrying." Clint turned to Natasha, and she could see one of his pupils was slightly larger than the other. He gagged, and she grabbed a basin and dropped it in his lap in time for him to choke up some bile. His hand went to his head.

"Okay. Less fine."

Natasha met Coulson's eyes over Clint's head. His mouth flattened into one exasperated line, like he was trying not to laugh. Natasha reached into her duffel bag, which was still over her shoulder, and pulled out a familiar grey object. She unzipped it and slipped it over Clint's shoulders as Coulson reached for the basin.

"Are you done?"

"For now." Clint wormed his good arm through the sleeve and leaned back on the pillows. He raised the cuff up to his face for inspection.

"Is this a soup stain?" Natasha smoothed the hood of the sweater down and peered at the faint orange stain, which brought back memories of a hurried rinse session over the sink of an airplane bathroom.

"It's not my fault if there's turbulence when I fly commercial." Natasha patted his leg with the tips of her fingers. "Blame Coulson."

She ignored the indignant look on Coulson's face and instead stole his chair, resting her feet on Clint's bedframe, feeling the stress of her mission melt away. She was here. And here was home.

Even if the people here were sometimes idiots.

Natasha was soaked through by the time she stepped into SHIELD headquarters. The rain was coming down in buckets, the New York sky grey and swollen with hovering rain clouds. She sneezed and shot the lobby security guard a dark glare as he beeped her badge. She was cold, and worn out, and her throat was raw and painful when she swallowed. Her feet took her, almost on autopilot, to the showers by her quarters, and she tugged her gear off none too gently and stepped under the hot spray of the water, unmoving for several minutes as she thawed out, trying to rid the chill that had seemingly settled in her bones.

A soft sound outside the curtain had her instantly back on edge, her hand catching the edge of the curtain and drawing it back enough that she could see someone moving her gear around where she had left it on the bench.

"What are you doing?" Her voice rasped in her throat, but the steam had helped some.

The figure turned around and the tension left her body as Clint held up her soaked undershirt and wrung it out on the tile. Water pooled on the floor between his booted feet.

"Hi, Nat." She let go of the curtain and let the hot water run over her scalp, soaking her hair and dragging it down in heavy, wet lines. Outside, she could hear him shifting her gear around, breaking down the pieces of body armor and laying it out to dry. She had never been so lax with her gear before, but she ached and her throat burned dully as she swallowed.

"What are you doing in here? Don't give me the co-ed shower excuse, you know what I mean."

"I wanted to check on you."

Natasha heaved a sigh and turned the handle, ending the hot spray. She reached for a towel and realized she hadn't grabbed any of her clothing from her quarters. She groaned.

"Clint, are you still there?"

"Yeah." He sounded like he was right on the other side of the curtain. "What do you need?"

She bit her lip. "A towel. Please."

"Sure." There was a brief pause, and then, "Are you okay, Nat?"

She looked down at the fading green and yellow bruises stretching over her ribs, and the dirty tape falling off her arm where she'd wrapped up her scrapes. She felt the itch and burn of her throat, and the fatigue of tired muscles, and weighed it all. She let the water run over her face, and her eyes, the heat burning at her skin, and exhaled.

"Natasha?" Clint bumped the curtain with a finger and the water droplets ran down and dripped outside onto the tile as the curtain rippled out. She watched it puddle.

"No." She shivered despite the spray. "I'm tired."

"Okay." Clint paused for a moment. "I'm going to go get you a towel, okay?"

"Thanks."

She heard his boots scuff over the ground and then thump away, and the door shut heavily behind him. She stood there, shivering slightly, and tried not to aggravate her injuries. Loathe as she was to admit it, she was lagging, worn out from her time spent stalking her last target in all sorts of conditions provided by the early winter weather. The man had been a recluse, paranoid and cautious, conducting his business deals in abandoned warehouses and spending his days in an ancient cabin in the woods. It had taken her nearly two weeks to figure out his patterns and get in close enough to capture him one night while he was on his way to a deal.

The resulting fight had been short, violent, and painful. She'd shrugged off the offer of medical aid and wrapped up her own injuries on the flight back to base. There wasn't a need for her to go to medical. She'd handled it before, and she could do it again. Except for one thing.

She heard the door to the showers open again, and heavy booted footsteps came back to her stall. The curtain rippled as it was tapped.

"Here, Nat." The edge of a dark navy towel was slid into the stall, and she ruffled her wet hair with it, feeling it snarl and puff up. She wrapped the fabric around her and stepped out onto the cold tile, her wet feet picking up the cold from the ground and making her shiver involuntarily. Something warm was dropped over her head, and she threw up an arm only to find herself encased in soft grey fabric.

"I figured this would be better than your damp gear." Clint held up a pair of her jeans, which he'd definitely been in her quarters to get. She ignored the fact that he'd taken the liberty of grabbing her some socks and underwear as well. They'd both seen each other exposed, but she'd rarely felt this fragile before him.

"Thanks." She coughed, and felt it stab sharply at her ribs, her throat protesting the motion. Her hands found themselves curled into familiar fists around the cuffs of the too long sweater. She pulled on the clothes Clint had brought, and when she found herself leaning on him as he walked her back to her room, she didn't object. His hand found its way to her shoulder blades and rubbed a warm path over her back and neck as she curled into his side, coughing, but content.

He was warm, after all.

Several months later, she sits outside a holding cell and watches her partner sweat and shake as he fights through the last tendrils of Loki's mind control. Her hands remain fisted in the grey fabric of a hooded sweatshirt, with ratty sleeves and more than just soup stains barely visible on the fabric. She runs the drawstrings through her fingers and sits still as stone.

The glass is one way, and he's tied down. They still won't let her go in with him, and she's just slightly too sore to argue too much. Her scalp still prickles from where he'd gotten a handful of her hair in his fingers and just _pulled_ , but she can see the crescent bite marks on his arm and feels they're equal. Besides, the pain outside, on her body, will pass. Internally, she's a minefield.

Her chest aches when she thinks of Coulson, and the body covered in a sheet down in the mess of the medical bay, lying cool and slowly stiffening among too many others.

Far too many others, she thinks, and allows her head to dip for just a moment. She's just a little bit sharp around the edges right now, broken glass and twisted pieces of a heart that trusted and was broken. It's not until Fury himself comes and stands next to her, watching, that she moves to stand up, ignoring the pain. Pain is material. Pain will pass.

She repeats this like a mantra, nodding along to Fury's statements as they watch Clint. There are a lot of similarities between them, she thinks. They are warriors, liars, both hardened to loss. Human beings made of marble, wanting only to survive, and maybe to protect the few things close to them.

When she's finally given the clearance to enter the room, she interrupts Fury mid-sentence and goes to sit across from Clint's inhibited figure, ignoring his watchful eyes as she settles in to keep watch. She keeps up a low and steady litany of words, some of the songs he likes to sing to fill in her silences, blending and mixing with ones from her own childhood.

Natasha may be sewn together from many pieces, her identity as fluid as her morals, but she understands now what it is to be loved. To have someone want you despite your faults and flaws and the blood on your hands. And Clint has done so much more than that. And so even when Clint thrashes and shakes his way through the remnants of the control, twitching away from her touch, she stays.

Because he is her partner, and she will protect him with the same loyalty he has given her. Because he deserves that trust he showed her that day so long ago, when he looked at a murderess and took her willingly by the hand. Clint Barton may have killed, but he was not a killer.

She knew the difference.

And so, when Clint shakes his head one final time and looks at her with confused and broken eyes, asking for the truth, she pulls no punches. But she does hand him the worn grey sweater, and the understanding in his eyes tells her everything.

Pain may be temporary, but forgiveness is forever. And in this moment, she chooses to forgive.


End file.
